Almost everything about Robert Frost, a collection of poems coming out with Book Works later this Spring, coauthored by Robert Frost and Stacy Skolnik, is interesting to me.
The poems themselves, of course, are interesting. All of the language comes from Facebook posts written by Frost as he documents his life as a homeless person in America, and is rich with material detail, the kind of hyper-specificity that only comes from real life. The poems are about what and where he eats (“Subway opens and I order / my coffee, 1.91. I hate how fast food places charge different prices / based on location”), where he charges his phone (“An outlet with a lock on it outside a Publix”), the people and animals he meets, where he sleeps, and how he spends his time (“Just played a little impromptu concert / for the boynton beach police”).
The poems also contain the full spectrum of human emotion. Frost’s language slips from joy to despair, from generosity to anxiety, from anger to a Zen-like calm. The poems are written with a completely unironic sincerity one scarcely finds in contemporary poetry, devoid of self-aggrandizement or self-consciousness.
Just as interesting is the way they’ve made their way to us in poem form. Skolnik, co-director of Montez Press Radio and writer often working with appropriated texts, who was a friend of Frost’s in high school, found herself drawn to these Facebook posts over the years. She began by archiving them, selecting a group of them to edit, lineate, and shape into poems. Finally, she arranged them into the full collection. And I’m so happy she did. I love this book. I want everyone to read it.
-Courtney Bush
COURTNEY BUSH: I’m really excited to talk about Robert Frost. I wanted to start by asking you about Robert Frost as a person and your relationship with him?
STACY SKOLNIK: I met Robert when I was around sixteen. He was a little older. I knew him through some mutual friends. He had this basement where people would go and hang out and use, basically, and at that point, he was very much, like, a figure. Eventually I lost touch with pretty much everyone I went to high school with. But as time went on, I would find myself, when I still had Facebook, occasionally stumbling upon Robert Frost’s page, well after leaving Long Island, well after finishing college. He had these posts that were just documenting his life while homeless. There was something so specific about his perspective and the detail with which he was cataloguing his experience that I thought was interesting on a material level, but also had this precision of observation that I thought was really beautiful. And at some point I started saving them. I would copy and paste these posts into a document over the course of years, not exactly knowing why I was doing that. I think I had a sense that, you know, these platforms that we live on are—as I experienced with mrsblueeyes123, a collection of poetry I wrote publicly on social media, and turned into a website after the account was banned from Instagram—here one minute, gone the next. So I didn’t know what might happen. He could’ve deleted his profile. Facebook could change its privacy policy. So I was just saving these posts without it being a conscious thought.
And then at some point, my friend, the writer Hannah Regel, who’s also now my editor at Book Works, was visiting New York. We were riding the train and she asked, “are you working on any poetry?” And I told her about how I’d been saving these posts by an itinerant musician I used to know named Robert Frost. “Robert Frost?” she asked.
“Robert Frost,” I said.
I rattled off a few lines that were ringing in my head: “pictures of peacocks / posing prettily” and she asked me to send her more.
CB: Did Robert know at this point?
SS: No. I hadn’t spoken to him. It was a creepy thing that I was doing. So, yeah, then I went back to his page and archived a bunch more posts and had a pretty long document of unlineated captions, essentially. Then I started lineating some of them and sent maybe ten poems to Hannah to share with her team at Book Works. But the whole time, when it was still a question of whether it was a project that they would be into, I was sort of like, well, if it is I’m gonna have to reach out to Robert, and that was something that I needed to decide if I was comfortable with, in terms of going back into my past in that way. Because I hadn’t spoken to him in so long and those teen years when I knew him weren’t exactly a good time in my life. But after some consideration I sent him a message via Facebook that received no answer and I was like, fuck, maybe this project isn’t gonna happen. Though I noticed on his About Page, it said, “Disclaimer: I ain’t gonna sue.” I thought that was so funny.
CB: That is so funny.
SS: But it also had his phone number. So I just sent him a text message. I was like, “Hey, it’s Stacy, we used to hang out in your basement in high school, I was friends with Diana. Do you remember me?” And he remembered me, he very much remembered me. Because we were friends.
CB: Was he happy to hear from you?
SS: He was really happy to hear from me. One thing I value a lot about this collaboration with Robert is how much trust he’s put in me despite the long gap in our correspondence. Considering his experience in the world, one might think he has no reason to trust people. For instance, right now, he’s locked up for loitering. We’ve communicated a little bit about some book stuff while he’s been in there, through the prison’s messenger app. He deals with a lot of bullshit from people. And, you know, there’s a lot I don’t know about him. With our relationship, I think it’s good for us to keep it as a creative collaboration. We have to have boundaries. It’s a good, healthy thing. I know he sees himself as an artist. A lot of the money he makes to get by is through busking. He’s a songwriter. And I think that being treated as a practicing artist has validated his sense of himself as one.
And it’s been reinvigorating for me. As someone who is a culture industry worker, it can be deflating when art becomes part of a mill of content but Robert is someone who, in my interpretation, makes work in a way that is unfettered by an overwhelming sense of an audience or market. Even though Facebook is public-facing and the whole point is the audience of one’s social circle, I don’t actually think it’s about the audience for him. It feels diaristic.
CB: I want to talk about the actual poems. So many of them include these moments where, as you mentioned before, he has to deal with bullshit from people, and that his trusting you maybe felt like a surprise because you’ve been reading these observations and experiences about his life where people are not being good to him. Because so much of the book is about his experience with people who aren’t treating him with dignity or respect.
SS: His trust in me has been validating. Like, yeah you actually can trust me and that makes me feel good about myself, you know? That’s such a generous act on his part, which is a beautiful gesture in a world where people are incredibly skeptical of each other all the time and understandably so. But for someone to experience those poles of kindness and violence constantly, and choose to continue having faith…
The book, the way that the poems are organized, does have an arc. It goes up, and then there’s this downward movement. There’s an emotional decline. And then it comes back up. That’s anyone’s life. You have days when you’re high and days when you’re low, but for someone to repeatedly choose to reemerge and keep going after hard times, I think is a very inspiring choice that one makes.
Sometimes I don’t remember the things he remembers when he’s texting me. I don’t know if it’s me or someone else that he’s remembering, but whatever our friendship was when we were younger, or however he’s preserved it in his memory, I’m grateful that it meant something to him and that he could trust me enough now to give me the freedom to work with his language this way. I’ve sent him the digital ARC. I don’t know if he’s read it in full, because the ARC became available pretty close to when he got locked up, so I don’t know if he’s had a chance to see it in full. But I did send him photos of the three poems that were in the Poetry Project Newsletter that won the Lisa Brannan Prize and he was like, “It was so nice of you to help me with those, wouldn’t even really have thought of those entries as poems, just journal entries. But it feels really great to see that there’s more poetry in what I write than what I tend to think at the time.”
To me it felt so clear. There was this precision to his observations, the way he’d document exact bike routes or describe a mundane situation like dropping a nickel or eating an Oreo through an incredibly idiosyncratic lens that felt inherently poetic.
But I don’t want to break it down into a science. I’m sure you’ve had instances where you’re talking to a friend or you see something in an ad, on a sign, a piece of paper on the ground, and you say ‘wow, that’s a poem’. You know it when you see it. And that’s what makes poetry magical—it’s so malleable. It resists being easily commodified or defined, which thematically aligns with the concerns of Robert’s posts as well.
CB: I love that response of his, “I love that you saw poetry in this,” because I do remember at a certain point you telling me that there were people in your writing group who were made very uncomfortable by the idea and who were sort of very ready to jump to the judgment that it’s exploitative. I want to hear your thoughts. It’s interesting that it’s so easy to jump to that conclusion without considering the feelings of the artist they’re insisting needs “protection.”
SS: The concern in my writing group, I think, was more that it would have been exploitative if I didn’t reach out to him. And that would be true. And I was scared to reach out to him.
CB: Did you consider not reaching out to him?
SS: Yes, but that would mean not publishing the poems. So I considered not doing the project because, yeah, the past is a scary place. Sometimes we leave the past in the past for a reason. But I remember talking to a friend of mine, I was telling him about the possibility of turning these poems into a collection, and should I reach out to Robert, and should I go down this road and revisit some of these characters from my past, dig up some of these memories, etc. And he reminded me, “no risk, no reward,” which is how I feel in general about artmaking.
CB: I find it really interesting that you talk about the project as emotional and personal, because you’re working with appropriated text. You’re talking about this project in terms of memory and personal history and difficult emotion, which are things more readily associated with a different kind of poetic composition. Lyric, narrative. It’s easy to think of appropriated texts or found texts or conceptual projects as cold and composed from a remove but this is not that at all. Can you talk about your relationship to working with found language?
SS: I think with a lot of my work the sum is greater than the parts. It’s kind of difficult to pull out one poem from Robert Frost and have it make total sense without the whole picture. If there are 80 poems in this collection, probably 75 percent of them really require the whole constellation of what’s happening in the world of Robert Frost to understand what’s being articulated. I think of myself almost more as a collage artist than I do a writer. An editor-cum-collage-artist-cum-conceptual-writer. Something. I pull from the world. I mean, all writers are doing that, but I think I’m doing it in a very tactile way. Material from the real world helps to construct the universe of my work, much of which deals with questions of who gets to speak, whose words are valued, and how the contexts in which language appears shapes its meaning. I like taking language from outside traditional literary spaces and repositioning it to ask who has the right to be heard and what determines value.
CB: Do you feel like it helps to get around the self, too? I’m wondering, like, if you’re trying to write a world, and a sort of capacious and full world, I think one of the obstacles can be the I or the self. Is that something you think about? Getting yourself out of the way? I mean not totally because obviously you’re still there because you’re gathering and composing, but it’s not like… me me me… I’m riding the D train, I’m thinking about xyz.
SS: Yeah, I love that idea. Right now I’m writing something in first person and it upsets me to read because of how much the word “I” appears. Even though it’s fiction, the way it sounds is bothersome. It feels repetitive. But on the other side of that coin, these first-person captions of Robert’s resonated with me so deeply. His life is not my life but there is this playfulness there that I hope to embody in my other projects as well, and in how I see the world, at least on a good day.
CB: Well, something about them called to you in this mysterious way. You felt you had to preserve them. It reminds me of this beautiful thing I heard. I was at Kiki and Herb’s Christmas show, and Justin Vivian Bond, as Kiki, was like, “I love when someone says ‘I love this song!’ because what they’re really saying is they love themselves.” They sense a part of themselves in the song that is easy, almost automatic, to love. And maybe it’s just easier to love parts of ourselves when they’re externalized. Because then we can actually see them.
SS: Totally. Of course the internet is often a very disturbing place to be, but a lot of the time—thinking of comments sections and Reddit and Facebook captions like Robert’s—I love the quality of the language and the way different people’s perspectives cohabitate. And through the inevitable discord that’s happening in those spaces, when I’m reading, I’m like, I’m all of these people. Which is maybe an egotistical thing, or the opposite of what you’re saying. I can’t escape myself. In the imprecision between all of that language one can find themselves—
CB: As part of it.
SS: Yes.
CB: I want to bring up the Transcendentalists. When I was reading Robert Frost, I couldn’t help but think about, like, Emerson. Wait, which one is Walden?
SS: Is that Thoreau?
CB: It’s Thoreau.
SS: We can look it up.
CB: It doesn’t matter. On record it doesn’t matter. But we know what Transcendentalism is.
SS: Vaguely.
CB: The reason I’m joking and don’t remember is because I learned about them as a child, in elementary or middle school, but I remember they left society, they questioned it, they protested what they observed to be wrong, they documented that protest, and believed that people had a right to live and be as they chose. These ideas are so strong in Robert’s writing, but what I think changes with Robert Frost is that he’s staying in society. The Transcendentalists seemed like hermits. That’s what Walden is. I’m alone at this pond. I don’t need anybody else. Though I think I heard somewhere recently that his mom was bringing him groceries and, like, cookies the whole time.
SS: Hell yeah, thanks, Mom. When I first messaged Robert and we were first communicating about my turning some of these posts into poems and publishing them I asked him questions, like, “Why this way of life? It seems really difficult.” And he had said—here, let me find the text exchange. He said:
SS: Part of the reason he doesn’t want housing is probably because it’s not conducive to the way his mind works. And I’ve come to learn that Robert is definitely passionate about homeless rights. When he was locked up this February, he was trying to get in touch with the news, he was trying to get his story out, perhaps naively so. My cynical brain was saying, I don’t know how many people are really going to care about this story, Robert. But he wants a revolution for homeless rights. In a way, what’s so powerful about his lifestyle is, like, this is inevitable. People don’t want to address the problem because it’s hard to answer, and makes us uncomfortable. What should we do about people who can’t or don’t fit society’s mold?
CB: Or those who simply don’t want to and don’t feel they should have to. I can only speak to the book but it doesn’t seem like he loses hope very often.
SS: I think, of course, sometimes a loss of hope comes up. He has that one moment about apologizing. “I’m deleting this app off my phone / so if you wanna apologize / my number is in my about section.”
CB: I love that one.
SS: It’s so good. But the problem that he exposes or is talking about is real. I don’t have the solution but I understand why it troubles people to encounter someone like Robert, because it so goes against everything that our society suggests is humane (and sane). He lives out of a large cart and has sacrificed a lot of the creature comforts most of us can’t imagine surviving without in order to live his life as a traveling musician. Having art and literature that shares people like Robert’s firsthand experience helps, because it is very outside of the norm. There’s no infrastructure really to support someone who wants to live this way. So it’s cool that the world of poetry can do a little bit of that, ever so slightly.
CB: At least it can support the language, the observation and experience in this form, you know, decontextualized as it is. I want to talk about sincerity in the book. Often in contemporary writing, when I encounter sincerity, it’s overblown and self-aggrandizing and embarrassing or, you know, totally ironic and self-conscious. That’s not happening here. And it’s extremely sincere.
SS: The sincerity is interesting because it’s internet writing. And I think we’ve come to associate internet writing with an impersonal quality, because it’s detached, mediated by the screen. I didn’t include any of the comments from any of these posts though, and that’s where a lot of the person-to-person (as opposed to systemic) coldness comes in. There are people who comment on his posts that are quite aggressive and cruel.
CB: What else happens for you in the process of recontextualizing this text?
SS: In addition to challenging a hierarchy of value by repositioning it as literature, I’m also admittedly painting a picture that I want, by selecting the captions I have, by putting them in the order that I have, or by excluding cruel comments.
CB: Well the cruelty comes into the book, but always through Robert’s voice, Robert’s perspective. Some people throw a McGriddle sandwich at him and the poem says:
SS: But I’m still considering it a blessing.
CB: Right. He gets the last word, he gets to decide. The writing is so conversational but it’s also so engaged in all the things poetry has always been engaged in. It’s recording the world in detail, the way people treat each other, what we see, animals, the mystery of being alive. Some of my favorite poems are the ones that have to do with his relationship to animals.
SS: Yeah, they’re really beautiful. Anyone who’s experienced a cross-species relationship understands the purity and depth and how meaningful it can be to be seen by and relate to other creatures who don’t judge you.
CB: He’s burying dead birds that he finds. He’s feeding bees.
SS: He has a pet lizard that runs away. I find that to be a very heartbreaking moment. His lizard kind of doesn’t need him anymore.
CB: Yeah! But he has so much grace for the lizard. The poem ends, “I’ll miss that little jumping / all over my body and burrowing / in my hair but yes, I hope he’s happy.”
SS: The lizard is his own man.
CB: Do you have a favorite poem?
SS: The mosquito poem.
CB: The mosquito poem is extremely special. It’s a poem about feeling sympathy for a mosquito with a broken nose that can’t suck his blood and wanting to put out a bowl of blood for it to drink. It gets at the deep generosity, which I think is the great theme of this book. Part of the poem reads: